URS

URS had its origins in a small consulting firm called Broadview Research that was formed in 1951 and was awarded a modest engineering contract by the U.S. Army. It changed its name to United Research Services Inc. in 1962 and two years later to URS Corporation (though it later went through another name change before returning to the URS designation). On the strength of its military work, it went public in 1968.

When the Pentagon revenue dried up in 1970, the company floundered until a new chief executive, Arthur H. Stromberg, expanded the firm’s business with state and local governments and then moved into the environmental services field through the 1973 purchase of Pollution Control Engineering Inc. Stromberg went on to make some unlikely acquisitions such as a video training company called Advanced Systems Inc. and the speed-reading firm Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics. (Both these were divested in the 1980s.) Stromberg also expanded the company’s role in managing major international engineering projects such as highways in Indonesia and power plants in South Korea.

In 1987 the company planned a reorganization in which its consulting operations would be spun off, and the remaining business would be renamed Thortec International. The moved turned out to be ill-fated. The Securities and Exchange Commission launched an investigation of the company’s reported results for 1986 and concluded that revenues had been improperly inflated. This and a shareholder class action suit brought about the resignation of the company’s top officers. One survivor of the affair was investment banker Richard Blum, then the company’s largest shareholder and a member of its board. Blum—the husband of Dianne Feinstein, then a gubernatorial candidate in California and later a U.S. Senator from the state—arranged for an infusion of capital into the company. That enabled the company, renamed URS, to survive and gave Blum an even larger stake.

Now run by corporate turnaround specialist Martin Koffel, URS sought to strengthen its position among the big project management firms by acquiring Greiner Engineering and Woodward-Clyde Group in the mid-1990s. Koffel followed that with the much larger purchase of Dames & Moore Group in 1999.

In 2002 URS took another expansionary step by acquiring EG&G Technical Services—a federal contractor poised to benefit from increased spending on homeland security in the wake of 9/11--from the Carlyle Group. In 2007 URS announced it would pay $2.6 billion to acquire one of its largest rivals, Washington Group International (formerly known as Morrison-Knudsen). The deal gave URS added expertise in areas such as nuclear engineering and should bring its 2008 revenues to over $8 billion.